Solid Weapon

If you've ever experienced a Metal Gear Solid game on consoles, you might get a slight feeling of déjà vu while playing Solid Weapon. In fact, we can almost picture the MGS little cartoon exclamation mark appearing above (series creator) Hideo Kojima's head, accompanied by that familiar 'alert' sound effect, were he ever to pick this game up.

Take the familiar secret base and jungle environments, the main character in camouflage and his name (or his special ops organisation's name, we can't figure out which) which just happens to be RedFox. That's a bit close to Snakey's Foxhound unit if you ask us.

Mr RedFox also counts amongst his special skills being able to sidle along walls and tap them to make a noise so as to attract patrolling guards. Sounds familiar, right? If spotted – yes, you've guessed it – an exclamation mark appears above their heads and you have a limited time to get away. Oh, and an onscreen radar shows you what each guard can see, using a cone of light to show the range of their vision and the direction they're facing.

Then again, it's perhaps a little unfair to simply describe Solid Weapon as a mobile Metal Gear Solid, not least when plenty of other stealth games have spawned from the PSone classic. Obviously, Solid Weapon has distinct differences – it's just a shame that the biggest one is how difficult it is to play.

On a positive note, the game uses some simple controls and has levels only a few minutes long, which make it an ideal on-the-move experience. Parts of it play well, too. Stages are like bite-sized puzzles to solve, involving judging when it's safe to move, sneaking up behind guards to silently slit their throats, and working out the solutions to simple obstacles, which mostly call for blocks to be pushed or blown up with C4 bombs found by searching lockers.

The problem is, stealth can be frustrating in the most perfect of conditions. On a giant TV with a control pad enabling precision control we've still called Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher the sorts of names normally reserved for the likes of John McCririck.

Using a tiny nub or numbered keys to pull off fancy, split-second footwork just doesn't work, and Solid Weapon could have done with putting more enemies into the levels and making the criteria for killing them less precise.

As it is, it can easily take 15 attempts to take out one guard, when him turning around spells an instant 'game over'. It's lucky the levels are short because there's no way you want to keep repeating kills when they're so difficult to get. True, things got a lot easier when we worked out we could sidle along a wall right into an enemy's line of sight and not be seen, then slit his throat from this position. Obviously that's exploiting a flaw in the game and even so, there are still certain enemies that are a nightmare to sneak up on without being quickly spotted.

Not helping matters is the fact each level is very similar – there are objectives, but they normally come down to either clearing an area of guards or finding a route out. The game's isometric visuals are adequate in terms of conveying the action, and quite detailed, too, but the grid system the game uses for movement isn't always well-suited to the stealth aspects. Moving away from a wall can take too long and what was meant to be a fluid motion becomes a stilted mess-up.

It is possible to do a decent stealth game on mobile, as proven by the likes of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Alas, Solid Weapon just doesn't pull it off and sadly ends up as a pretty clunky, irritating experience.